Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

Posted Jul 28, 2021 8:29 UTC (Wed) by mcortese (guest, #52099)
Parent article: Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

Of all the initiatives to enlarge Rust's use base, this is the least interesting, to me.

Small, stand-alone utilities trigger none of the strengths of Rust: use-after-free is not an issue here, fail paths can be ignored, memory safety is not critical... Besides, static linking seems a poor choice for a collection of independent yet correlated executables.

On the other hand, I welcome the effort to renew our venerable tools introducing better ideas, even though this means breaking compatibility with the old syntax. I only wish they also get rid of the classic Unix argument parsing! Does cat -h invoke the help or print a file named hyphen-h? Of course the former, but only out of convention, not enforced by any syntax rules.

Isn't it funny that a language that explicitly abhorred in-band signaling for e.g. return values, is used to perpetrate in-band option passing?